U-505: A 70-year-old war story that should be remembered

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He's a little unsteady on his feet so he uses a walker or a cane to get around his Tempe home.

That's how it is these days with men like Bob Lofgren, men who went to war and saved the world and then came home to lead ordinary lives.

Today, Bob, 92, is in Chicago for the 70th and final reunion of a U.S. Navy task force that hunted German submarines during World War II.

Final because their numbers are dwindling and sadly, their stories are fading. As the nation prepares to remember D-Day, Bob's wife, Sue, says we should know, too, what happened on June 4, 1944.

Bob was 20 when he enlisted in the Navy in April 1942, leaving his job as a carpenter in a bomb loading plant. He'd hoped to become a pilot but his ears were better than his eyes and so he was sent to sonar school and eventually landed on the USS Chatelain, a destroyer escort.

"Eighty percent of the crew had never before been on a ship, including me," Bob told me this week, before leaving for Chicago. "That was part of the World War II greatness, that cowboys, cotton pickers and carpenters became military people and also construction people."

Bob, a sonarman 1st class, was assigned to help equip the new ship in 1943 as it prepared to join the hunt for German U-boats in the war's longest running battle, the Battle of the Atlantic. Task Group 22.3 -- the carrier USS Guadalcanal and five escorts including the Chatelain -- had been on the hunt for several weeks, alerted by Allied cryptanalysts who had broken the Enigma naval code that subs were operating off the African coast.

It was just after 11 a.m. that Sunday morning when the Chatelain made sonar contact off the African coast.

"We took a run at the sub and fired our hedgehogs – 25 pound shots – over the bow and missed him," he said. "The captain ordered us turned around and to change to our depth charges and we blew him out of the water."

The U-boat surfaced and the task force fired small arms, to hasten the crew's escape overboard before it could finish scuttling the submarine.

An eight-man boarding crew then leaped onto the slippery deck and down the hatch as water closed over the back of the still moving sub, which was on the verge of upending. Somehow they managed to close valves and yank the wires out of time bombs placed around the vessel, saving both the submarine and a wealth of top-secret codebooks, machinery and other documents.

Seventy years ago today, these men pulled off the Navy's first capture of an enemy warship at sea since the War of 1812 and then even more remarkably, 3,000 young sailors kept it secret for the rest of the war. This, so that the Germans wouldn't discover that that the Allies had broken the Enigma codes.

"It was extremely important to keep it secret," Bob said. "It was two days before D-Day and the sub contained a great amount of important German Navy intelligence. Intelligence officers flew in on a seaplane to pick it up."

The information recovered allowed Allied forces to step up its sinking of U-boats in the final 11 months of the war.